From Crosby County to Lubbock, isolated reports tell of extensive crop damage

Mark Kelley called the storm that moved across the South Plains on Wednesday, June 5, “the good, the bad and the ugly.”

Kelley, an agronomist with the Texas A&M Extension Service, explained the good was the moisture, the bad was the wind damage and the ugly was the effect of hail on crops in some areas.

A clear picture of the damage wasn’t known to Kelley, who said assessment was still taking place. He does expect in some areas the damage could be significant.

John Burke, the laboratory director at the USDA Cropping Systems Research Laboratory on Fourth Street in Lubbock, said damage at the facility wasn’t unusual from what some farmers have experienced in the past. The total loss of 40 acres of mainly experimental crops wasn’t an indicator of how bad this week’s storm was. Burke said in 11 years this is the worst storm damage he has seen, but credited it to being lucky in the past and not getting hit like they did Wednesday.

“Everything that was above ground was lost,” Burke said.

Both the wind and hail were to blame, he explained, for the total loss of corn, cotton and sorghum fields. Three greenhouses were also damaged in the storm. Total cost of the damage was still being calculated.

Dryland farmers who got more than a half-inch of rain might have benefited the most. Kelley explained amounts of less than a half-inch weren’t as useful for most dryland fields. The overcast weather Thursday, he pointed out, allowed the moisture to seep into the soil a little deeper.

Calvin Trostle, a Texas A&M Extension Service agronomist, said winds clocked at 82 mph at Reese Center and 84 mph south of Wolfforth caused an unknown amount of damage.

The storm, Trostle explained, covered a wider area than recent fronts, but unless farmers were irrigating their crop, those only getting a quarter-inch of rain didn’t gain much.

“If you get a quarter-inch today,” Trostle said, “in addition to a quarter-inch the day before, that is meaningful.”

The farmers who got in the range of an inch of rainfall, he added, got some real help from the precipitation.

Dryland farmers who haven’t planted cotton could still plant sorghum, sunflowers or guar, Trostle said. But, it is a gamble for them at this point.

“If this is the first and the last inch of rain,” he said, “it doesn’t make much sense to get a dryland crop started.”

Lloyd Arthur, a farmer near Ralls in Crosby County, planted both irrigated and dryland acres with cotton. The rainfall on the dryland acres saved his crop there, but the hail and wind wiped out about half his irrigated crop.

“There is nothing in the field,” Arthur said of a swath cut through his fields.

Arthur estimated in some places the damage path through his and his neighbors’ fields is nearly 4 miles wide. While he said replanting cotton was an option, his plans are to replant with sorghum.

The 400 acres of dryland crop Arthur had planted needed the rain before the seeds could germinate. The plants had not germinated and sprouted and that prevented them from being damaged by the hail and wind. Of the 1,800 acres of his irrigated land, Arthur estimates between 700 and 800 acres to be a total loss and several hundred acres more have spot damage.

At the Plains Cotton Growers, Inc. office, Mary Jane Buerkle, director of communications, said the office was getting reports of damage.

“We do know of some fields where the crop was lost,” Buerkle said. “Some of it was from the wind, some of it was from the hail, some of it was a combination.”

Buerkle called the storm the first significant widespread precipitation event in quite some time.

“The moisture is certainly beneficial,” she said. “We’re not going to turn down a rain.”

While Buerkle noted it was unfortunate the rain came with such strong winds and damaging hail, she added thunderstorms like Wednesday’s weren’t uncommon in West Texas. She said it wasn’t possible to speak in a general sense about how the storm helped or harmed farmers because they were all affected in different ways.